Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island was still a dirt road in the 1930s. My great grandfather, an immigrant from Croatia, found his only full time job in America on a road paving crew. When I was growing up in the 1980s, a relative was struck and killed by a car that plowed through a crosswalk on that same road, the busiest street of that New York City borough. But back when the road was full of mud, and Slavs and Sicilians were not the equal of Anglo-Saxons in America, my grandma was a teenage girl retrieving her father from a drunken stupor, beside the fresh asphalt. The homebrew wine was white and potent.
I drank the same from basement water jugs my friend's uncle fermented for a Yugoslavian Fourth of July party in Westerleigh, 1990. The Knickerbocker boy with the blonde bangs set the neighbor’s bushes on fire. The hose didn’t reach. We put the fire out with buckets. The fireworks continued.
I smoked my first joint with my second cousin, named for our great grandfather. It was down in Jackson Township, New Jersey. There were pine barrens where we used to sip whiskey, shoot guns, and find old discarded pornographic magazines. The women had authentic breasts and wild pubic hair. I loved the old 1970s rock music, and women’s armpit hair. My cousin died in a car wreck on Route 9 two years later.
Nicola, who dodged the draft in Austria-Hungary to survive the First World War, died eventually from leukemia. Some doctor bled him with leeches trying to save him. I read he was buried in Saint Mary’s by the Sea. His wife joined him a few years later.
Decades later, I went searching for their graves, but couldn’t find a marker.